Sometimes it feels like white Christians are the only religious voting bloc with true sway in America. Conservative evangelicals in particular have a great deal of power in the Republican Party, thanks to their tight embrace of Donald Trump. I often hear people talk about how Democrats can win back some white Christian support, as if that should be the party’s priority in the coming years.

But with Democrats searching for their future, they’d be foolish to ignore a large and growing religious group that is already in their corner: the Nones.

Now nearly 30 percent of the population, the Nones include atheists, agnostics and people who say they’re no faith in particular. According to new data from the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan polling organization, 72 percent of the religiously unaffiliated voted for Kamala Harris. Melissa Deckman, the chief executive of P.R.R.I., shared a more granular breakdown of unaffiliated voters with me over email: 82 percent of atheists, 80 percent of agnostics and 64 percent of those who said they had no particular faith voted for Harris.

“When placed into context with our other findings from the 2024 post-election survey,” Deckman wrote, “we can see how distinct the unaffiliated are. They are almost three times as likely to report voting for Harris than Trump, and only Black Protestants reported voting for Harris at higher rates.”

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posted by f.sheikh

While genocide is a clear cause of the democrats’ defeat, economic issues are usually mentioned. What lingers behind the significance of the “it’s the economy” narrative?

This claim, which focuses on genocide, is controversial, as numerous other analysts assert that “the economy” was the decisive factor in the elections, based on polls. Nevertheless, we may gain further insight by consulting the views of an expert in the field:

“John Della Volpe is the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. The Washington Post referred to John as one of the world’s leading authorities on global sentiment, opinion, and influence, especially among young Americans and in the age of digital and social media .”

Della Volpe writes about the U.S. election results:

“…Ms. Harris’s campaign needed to shift about one percentage point of voters across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to secure the presidency, but instead struggled in college towns like Ann Arbor, Mich., and other blue places.

… When young Americans voiced deep moral concerns about Gaza and the humanitarian crisis unfolding there, they received carefully calibrated statements rather than genuine engagement with their pain. I believe this issue contributed to lower enthusiasm and turnout in battleground states in 2024 compared to 2020 .”

“One percentage point of voters.” Let that sink in! The citation above is from an abridged version of a New York Times opinion piece, now accessible only via a paywall .

Polls are not necessarily objective; they are often part of the mainstream media narrative surrounding elections and their outcomes. What implications does the question of “the economy”
have for the voter? Such a poll is inherently biased. Does it consider that the economy is inextricably linked to the accumulated U.S. multi-trillion military objectives around the globe, and therefore not an abstract soundbite up in the air, thus instead linked to imperialism? No.

The narrative of “it’s the economy,” as detached from its external manifestation of massive military and related expenditures, is so pervasive in popular consciousness that a spontaneous response of “the economy” is understood to refer to that relatively abstract and emasculated view based exclusively on domestic considerations such as inflation.

Given the above, if the issue of genocide played a decisive role in tipping the scales against Kamala Harris, one might wonder why it was not more prominently reflected in polling data. The pervasive narrative in the United States and the West is so omnipresent and airtight against even mentioning “Palestine” or “Gaza” that it becomes insidious. This narrative conflates pro-Palestine sentiments with anti-Zionism and antisemitism, creating an environment where voters might hesitate to provide such answers in surveys that could identify them. The fear of retaliation is a genuine concern in this highly charged atmosphere. However, as the Director of Polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics has shown, in the anonymity of the voting cycle, many individuals who might have supported the Democratic candidate opted either to abstain or to vote for the anti-genocide Green Party, ultimately contributing to Harris’s defeat.

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Annie Rauwerda

Asterisk: You’re famous for the Depths of Wikipedia account, where you share factoids from some of the most arcane, interesting, and surprising pages on Wikipedia. But you’re also now a part of the broader Wikipedia community. How did you first get interested in the site, and how has your involvement changed over time? 

Annie Rauwerda: I started back in high school editing typos and adding things that I noticed were missing — like items to lists. But I had never done anything more than that because I was afraid of it because there are so many rules. Like, I’d seen the talk pages. And many of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines and essays are very wordy.

Then I started the account — even though I felt a little like a phony. But I remember the first time I felt really excited about the Wikipedia community was when I got on a call with the president of Wikimedia, New York City, back in 2020. And she had told me about a guy named Jim who retired from working at the phone company. He worked in that big AT&T building that doesn’t have windows. I don’t know exactly what he did in there — but cables and stuff. Anyway, he’s retired now, and he spends all day biking around New York City and taking photos of infrastructure for Wikipedia, because Google Maps photos — and so many other photos — aren’t freely licensed. And I was like, that’s amazing.

So I kept hearing about more and more individual people and their shticks. There are a lot of generalists who edit Wikipedia, but there’s something so endearing about the people who have just one thing. That’s the first time I got excited. That was when I was brave enough to start making bolder changes and writing my own articles. 

A: Wikipedia’s tagline is the “free encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world,” which makes it sound like a cohesive, happy little family. But as you alluded to, there’s a lot of rules. It’s intimidating to write articles. Is it actually the case that there is a Wikipedia community, or is it more accurate to talk about communities within Wikipedia?

AR: The answer is both, of course, but when people talk about Wikipedia as a decision making entity, usually they’re talking about 300 people — the people that weigh in to the very serious and (in my opinion) rather arcane, boring, arduous discussions. There’s not that many of them. 

There are also a lot of islands. There is one woman who mostly edits about hamsters, and always on her phone. She has never interacted with anyone else. Who is she? She’s not part of any community that we can tell.

But then there are hundreds of thousands of editors on English Wikipedia. And within that there are very specific communities that are really interesting. There’s the military history WikiProject. Maybe this makes sense because of the whole military thing, but they are very hierarchical. They have a lot of rules. They’re very efficient in reviewing articles. Also Wikipedia has a pretty outdated rating system for articles — one of which just got deprecated when “Featured Articles” and “Good Articles” became a thing — except for in military history, because that community was like, well, we need to have every level. 

The same thing is true of the tropical cyclones community. They also do a lot of reviewing, and they also tend to skew very young. It’s a lot of teenage boys in tropical cyclones. There’s also a very strong anti-vandal community, who similarly skew very young. 

A: Before I had Wikipedia friends, I did not really understand how many different silos there were.

AR: So many. There are acronyms that I hear that I do not know. The anti-vandal people especially are really off in their own world. One of the most effective, consistent, long serving anti-vandalism patrollers is not a teenager. He’s a PhD-level material scientist who used to write very high quality articles about chemicals. And then he just got too upset about vandalism and decided “I have to devote hours of my life — even though I have a family and a really demanding job — to this.”

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No one knows exactly how a war would unfold, only that the sort of “bolt from the blue” surprise attack around which all three great nuclear powers have built their deterrent structures is unlikely because of the strength of those very structures. The critical challenge now is not how to ward off a sneak attack but how to control an escalation that occurs in plain sight — for instance, a conventional conflict that goes wrong, leading to nuclear saber rattling, leading to the first use of a few small nuclear weapons on the battlefield, leading to the counteruse of small nuclear weapons, leading to much of the world sliding uncontrollably into extinction.

The best available model of such an event is an ultrasecret 1983 Pentagon war game called Proud Prophet. That game was a nuclear test of sorts, and it provided critical lessons that remain crucial today. It was unique in that by design it was largely unscripted, involved the highest levels of the U.S. military and its global warfighting commands and used actual communication channels, doctrines and secret war plans. One of its great strengths was that unlike any other war game involving the possibility of small-yield nuclear weapons, it ran freely and was allowed to play out to its natural conclusion: global devastation.

The conclusion was a shock. The lesson drawn from it — that nuclear war cannot be controlled — had a decades-long effect on American strategy and therefore, in a world of opposing mirrors, on global strategies. It may be that someday in the future a survivor will be able to look back at our times and observe that the greatest tragedy in all of human history is that among current leaders in Russia and the United States, and perhaps other countries, the lesson was forgotten.

History shows that deterrence often fails and that countries can maneuver themselves into corners where they have no choice but to enter into wars they cannot win, wars of assured self-destruction. Now we are entering an era where nuclear arms control is an open question, nonproliferation has failed, conventional conflicts are spreading, overwrought nationalism is on the rise, the use of small nuclear weapons again seems possible, deterrence is weakening and fools dream of managing nuclear escalation in the midst of battle. Nuclear war in some form seems to be coming to the neighborhood. There is little sign that changes are being pursued to lower the risk. There is no reason to panic, but Katie, bar the door.

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